Heavy quarkonium dissociation by thermal gluons at next-to-leading order in the Quark–Gluon Plasma

Using the chromo-electric dipole coupling Hamiltonian from QCD multipole expansion, we derive the dissociation cross sections of heavy quarkonia by thermal gluons at next-to-leading order (NLO, also known as inelastic parton scattering dissociation) in the Quark–Gluon Plasma (QGP) in the framework of second order quantum mechanical perturbation theory. While suffering divergence (infrared and soft-collinear divergences) in vacuum, the cross sections thus derived become finite in the QGP as rendered by the finite thermal gluon masses. In contrast to the leading order (LO, also known as gluo-dissociation) counterparts rapidly dropping off with increasing incident gluon energy, the NLO cross sections exhibits finite value toward high energies because of new phase space being opened up. We then carry out a full calculation of the dissociation rates for various charmonia and bottomonia within a non-relativistic in-medium potential model. The NLO process is shown to dominate the dissociation rate toward high temperatures when the binding energies of heavy quarkonia become smaller relative to the Debye screening mass.